PORTLAND, Maine — If you enjoy crime novels set in Maine, you’ve got plenty to choose from. There are stories set on the coast, in cities and suburbs and small towns, on islands and lakes and rivers and mountains and—you get the idea.
Claire Ackroyd wanted to do something different. A landscape designer and organic inspector, she was looking to write her first novel and knew exactly where she wanted to set the story: in the sugar camps that produce much of the state’s maple syrup. The area was familiar to her from her work certifying which maple syrups were organically produced.
The events in her novel, “Murder in the Maple Woods,” unfold in the region south of the Maine-Quebec border from roughly Jackman to Millinocket.
“It’s such an interesting place,” Ackroyd said. “I was completely blown away when I first went up there.”
The sugar camps are remote, even by the standards of the North Woods.
“North of Jackman, there are no public roads,” she said. “These big camps, where people might be running as many as 80,000 taps, are only accessible from Canada. The producers are all French-Canadians. Extraordinary bunch of people. Terribly interesting place to know.”
It soon became evident to Ackroyd that there was rich material for a novel in this little-known setting.
“I was really taken with the toughness, the skills, the adaptability, the thoroughly resourceful people who are making all the syrup," she said.
It wasn’t just the people who provided inspiration. So did the atmosphere.
“Driving around you start thinking, there’s a thousand ways to die up in these woods. And it would be really easy to disguise a murder as an accidental death,” she said. “Then I wanted the knowledge of how syrup is produced and how it’s certified organic to be how you solve the mystery. And that started turning in my head until I came up with a story.”